Arrows of the Sun (4 page)

“Surely,” said Merian, “and I could never have endured a
rival. But Asanion took its revenge, takes it still, and forgets nothing. And
never, never forgives.”

“Then what’s left to us?” Estarion said. “Civil war? Asanion
chafes, it always has, but in the end it gives in. You saw how yonder
princeling was, once I made him see what else I am.”

“What you would rather not be.” Iburan sounded tired. “He
saw that, too. Be sure of it.”

“What if he did? They’re slaves born, all of them, even the
princes. Once he knew that I have blood-right to his homage, he gave it. He’d
have slit his own throat if I’d ordered him to.”

“There,” said Iburan more wearily than ever. “There you have
it. Half of your empire is Asanian. Half of you is Asanian. And you know no
more of the truth of yourself or your empire than a blindfish knows of the
sun.”

Estarion’s head throbbed. “It is
not
half of me! It’s a trickle in the tide that I am. No Asanian
has tainted my blood since Hirel himself.”

“‘Tainted,’” said Merian. “Dear goddess help me. And you
believe it.”

“Is it false?” Estarion asked her.

She did not answer.

He swept his hand down his body. “Look at me. What do you
see? Northerner, as pure as makes no matter. Except for this.” His fingers
clawed as if to rake his eyes; but he knotted them into fists. “If my father
erred, then so did Varuyan before him, and Ganiman before that. None after
Sarevadin endured an Asanian marriage. And she was married to Hirel Uverias,
who was like no Asanian who ever was, or ever would be.”

“No,” said Iburan. “He was nothing remarkable, except that
he loved a foreigner. And that, he always said, was a doom of his line.”

“So it is,” Estarion said slowly. He caught himself before
he said something he would regret. He would not bring Vanyi into this, or soil
her with its touch.

“Estarion,” said Merian, “listen to me. The time is ill, but
it will never be better; and you must know, and accept. When your father wedded
me, he promised his council that his son would not repeat his error.”

“It was an error to marry for love?”

“For him,” said the empress mother, “and for his empire, it
was. It killed him. You must not err as he erred. You must do what he failed to
do. You must take a bride in the west.”

“No,” said Estarion flatly.

He could not say that he had not expected it. He had ears,
and wits. He knew that his council did not approve of Vanyi. She was a
commoner. Her father fished off the coast of Seiun isle. She brought him no
wealth or power, nor any dowry but herself.

But an Asanian. A yellow woman. Serpent-breed, to breed
serpent-children.

His gorge rose. He would not do it. He could not.

“You will consider it,” his mother said. “That much at least
you will do.”

“I have considered it,” he said. “I refuse it.”

“Have you ever even seen an Asanian woman?”

Estarion rounded on Iburan. “Why in nine hells—”

“How can you judge anything unseen and untested? Before your
priestess came, you shuddered at Islanders and called them corpse-folk and
fish-people, and reckoned them less than human.”

“Islanders never killed my father,” said Estarion.

“That’s Asanian, you know. That obstinacy. That
unwillingness ever to forgive.”

Estarion laughed. It hurt. “You can’t have both sides of it,
foster-father. Either Asanians are sorely misunderstood, or all my vices are
theirs, and none of my virtues.”

“How can you know until you know them? You can’t avoid them
forever, no matter whom you choose for your empress. Asanion has had no emperor
in its palace since your father died there. Soon or late, you’ll have to face
it and them.”

“Are you telling me that I should ride west in the morning?”

“Hardly that,” said Iburan, impervious to the weight of
Estarion’s irony. “You’ll need a cycle or two at least to settle this half of
the empire. But then, yes, I think you should begin a progress into the west.
People are expecting it. They need to see you, to know what you are.”

“As yonder princeling did?”

“Even so,” said Iburan. “If you have nothing better to give
them.”

“God,” said Estarion. “Goddess. That would be war.”

“So shall it be, if you let him go back unchallenged to his
people, and tell them what you did to him.”

Estarion shut his aching eyes. It was no quieter in the
dark. “I don’t suppose one could apologize.” The word caught in his throat.

“One could,” said Iburan. “But he’s only one man. What he
did . . . he acted for a whole realm. That realm must see you.
It must know that you belong to it as to the rest.”

“My father took such counsel,” Estarion said. “He died for it.”

“He died because no one would believe that an emperor, a
mage born, needed protection from magery in his own palace. He died because we
were fools, Estarion.”

“Yes,” Estarion said. His throat was sour with bile. “You
were fools. All of you. He too. I. Everyone.” He swallowed hard. “I’ll be a fool.
I’ll go. Damn you, foster-father. I’ll go.”

“Soon?”

Estarion’s head was splitting. No one was trying to get into
it—it was not that kind of pain. This came from within. It made his sight blur,
and made him say, “When Brightmoon comes back to the full. Four days—no. Three.
I’ll go into the west. I’ll face my demons. I’ll make myself remember. But I
won’t—I
won’t
—bed an Asanian woman.”

“That is as the god wills it,” said the god’s priest. There
was no triumph in his voice. He was never one to gloat over victories, was
Iburan of Endros.

Silence ruled the heart of Avaryan’s temple in Endros,
silence so deep it seemed to drink the light, to transform the hiss of breath
to a roar and the murmur of blood into thunder. No foot fell, no voice spoke.
Even the air was still, wrapped in the temple’s veils and bound with magery.

Vanyi kept vigil in her due turn, now praying to the
omnipresence of the god, now casting nets of power on the seas that were the
mageworld. Most often there were two to watch and to pray, but on this day of
Estarion’s enthronement, all mages who could were set to guard the palace and
the emperor.

He was more valuable by far than the Magegate that shimmered
where wall should be. That might fail or close, but mages could restore it,
however high the cost. If Estarion died, there would be no heir of the god on
earth; and that would be beyond repairing.

Strange to think of him so, and to know what he had been in
the morning, tousled laughing boy-man covering terror with exhilaration. Her
power twitched, yearning toward him, but the magewall barred it. And she was
forgetting her duty.

She traced the patterns of the dance, sang the song that
sustained the Gate. Dance and song were part of her, had always been part of
her. Even on the shores of Seiun, fingers raw from mending the nets, nostrils
full of the stink of the fish, her feet had known the steps, her voice the
notes.
Mooncalf
they had called her,
and
witch
, and
changeling
, with her sea-eyes and her hair the color of moors in
autumn. She knew the speech of the gulls, felt in her bones the sway of the
tides.

That was far away now, long ago. She stood in this chamber
as in a globe of glass, and even the pull of the moons was faint, overwhelmed
in the roar and reach of the Gate. There was sea on the other side of it, tides
that were no tide of this earth, waves heaving and falling on a shore that
looked like dust of rubies, or like blood.

As she watched, it blurred and shifted, and she looked into
darkness full of stars; but stars that were eyes, great burning dragon-eyes
staring into her own. Seeing her. Knowing her for what she was.

She gasped. A Word burst out of her, raw and barely shaped.
The stars blinked, steadied. They were only stars.

A shudder racked her. The worlds changed: that was the way
of Gates. Most were alien. Some were horrible, hells of ice or of fire,
swarming with demons. None had ever left her as these stars had, crouched on
her knees, heaving as if she had taken poison.

She scraped wits and power together. They were thin, threadbare,
but they were enough to cast a net.

The seas were calm. Nothing swam there but what belonged in
that place. Mages about their workings. Lesser folk dreaming, asleep or awake.
Spirits of air and fire at their incalculable pursuits. No threat. Nothing to
fathom that instant of horror.

She pulled in the net. Her heart had ceased its hammering.
Her knees were steady again. The sweat dried on her body. She went down on her
face before the Gate, and began the prayer of the sun’s descent.

o0o

Estarion came to his chambers much earlier than Vanyi had
expected. It would have been like him to leave the lords’ feast and go down
into the city and pass the night with his people, drinking their beer and
singing their songs and showing them why they loved him.

He never calculated that, or thought of it as politic. He
liked them, that was all.

He had been in the city: the beer-scent came in before him.
He was in plain city-walking clothes, his court robes long since laid away. She
heard him calling goodnights to the battalion of his friends, and them chaffing
him for turning lily maid while the night was young.

“
Maid
!” someone
cried. “And what’s he got inside, then? Maybe he’s got the right of it. Who’s
for a fine warm woman to while the night away?”

They roared at that. Estarion laughed and shut the door on
them.

Vanyi looked up from the book she had been staring at for
longer than she could reckon. Estarion was a shadow beyond the lamp’s glimmer.
She mustered a smile for him.

He moved into the light. There was no laughter in him, no
sign that she could see of the face he had shown his friends. This was somber,
almost grim.

“Troubles?” she asked him.

“No,” he said. He gave himself the lie: snatched the rings
from his ears, flung them at the wall. They clattered to the floor.

Carefully, precisely, she rolled the book shut and fastened
the cords. “Disasters, then,” she said.

He dropped his coat more gently than he had the rings. “When
Brightmoon is full, I’m going to Asanion.”

She stared at him.

“Surely someone told you?”

His tone was nasty. She ignored it. “I came direct from the
temple. Everyone else was in the hall or elsewhere.”

His long mouth twisted. She wanted to kiss it. He said, “I
looked for you after your Gate-duty should have been over. I thought you would
come to my banquet.”

“I wanted to.” She shivered. It was cold in the room, she
told herself. She had dismissed the servants when they came to light the
brazier, then forgotten it and them. “I was more tired than I thought. I slept
a little.” And waked to nightmares, and sought refuge in a book of which she
remembered nothing, not even its name. “By the time I could have come, you were
gone into the city.”

He pulled his heavy plait over his shoulder and tugged at
the bindings. They were stubborn. His brows knit.

She worked her fingers under his. They were stiff, quivering
with tension. He let his hands fall, let her unwind the cords, loosen the
braid. His hair was his great beauty, thick and curling yet soft and fine as
silk, so black it gleamed blue. She filled her hands with it.

His body was taut. She kissed the point of his shoulder. He
barely eased. “Why?” she asked. “Why exactly now?”

He told her all of it, words honed to a bitter edge. The
Asanian, the test—he made little of it. Too little, maybe, but she was not
ready to solve that riddle tonight. But his mother’s command—

“I’ll go west,” he said through gritted teeth. “I’ll face my
demons. I’m no coward. But I won’t—I
won’t
—be
stud bull to a herd of yellow women.”

“It need only be one,” Vanyi said. Her voice was steady. She
was proud of that. “So. It’s a long way to Kundri’j Asan. Long cycles of the
moons. A year, maybe, at the pace of a royal progress.”

“A year and three days?” His smile was thin. He kept count,
too. “Not likely, my love. They’ll have me over the border as fast as the court
can travel, and into the Golden Land, marshaling parades of yellow women.”

“Teaching Asanion that you are its emperor.”

“It does need lessoning,” he said. Breath gusted out of him.
“God and goddess, Vanyi. I thought I was safe from this for years at least.
There’s empire enough here to keep any man occupied.”

“Except that it’s yours entirely, and always has been, and
always will be. Keruvarion knows you, loves you. Asanion has never seen you.”

“It saw plenty of me when I was younger. I do remember that
much,” he said, sharp, almost angry. “They marched me about like a prize calf.
They dressed me in so many robes I could barely move, and perched me in a
litter, and made me sit like an icon for people to gape at.”

“You were a child then,” Vanyi said. She did not know where
the words were coming from. The earth, maybe. The cold thing that, a little
while ago, had been her heart. Had the empress mother been trying to ease the
blow this morning, telling her that she could never be empress? She worked the
knots out of the emperor’s shoulders and said to him, “They never knew you as a
man. Now you’ll show them. You’ll teach them to love you as your easterners do,
for the brightness that’s in you.”

“I’m as dull as an old stone,” he said, with the soul
burning so fierce in him that her mind’s eyes were dazzled, and his eyes
lambent gold, and gold burning in his hand. She felt the wash of it, the pain
that would have sent any other man into whimpering retreat, but only sharpened
his temper and made him rub his hand against his thigh.

She caught it, held it to her cheek. It was no more than
humanly warm, stiff with the metal that was born in it, holy and impossible.
All the heat burned within. “Oh, my lord,” she said, and her eyes pricked with
tears. “Oh, my dear lord. How can anyone keep from loving you?”